For Three Months She Wrote Letters To An Unknown Soldier — The Duke Read Every Single One

Chapter 5

He rationed them.

That was the word he used in his own head, and he used it deliberately, because a man who calls a theft a ration has already decided how the argument ends. One letter every three days. No more, no matter how loud the night was. He kept them wrapped in the oiled canvas inside his own haversack, and he did not tell Lieutenant Carew what he was reading, and Carew — who had been with him since Corunna and had learned when to look at nothing — did not ask.

The second letter he read by the light of a guttering candle in a barn outside Brussels, with the rain coming through the roof in one thin thread.

They played a waltz tonight. You spin in circles until the room blurs, held far too close by a man who is calculating, to the nearest pound, what your dowry would produce in a year. It is a transaction wearing silk. I stepped on his foot on purpose. He apologized to me. The world is entirely mad.

Sebastian laughed again, and this time the laugh hurt, because his ribs had been strapped since Quatre Bras and everything hurt, and that was somehow exactly right. He had not laughed properly since he had left England. He had not wanted to.

The third letter was about the season. She described it as a machine for the sale of daughters, which was the truest sentence he had ever read in a woman’s hand, and it made him think, unwillingly, of a hundred drawing rooms in which he had stood like a prize bull while mothers said his title out loud for the pleasure of hearing it.

The fourth letter was signed.

— Verity Marlow, Grosvenor Square, London

Sebastian stared at the name for a long while. He did not know why she had signed it — whether it was carelessness, or defiance, or some slow-burning decision that a woman who had written this much truth ought at least to own it with her name. He only knew that a phantom had become a person, and that the person lived somewhere on a street he could have walked in eight minutes.

He folded it carefully and did not touch the fifth letter for nine days, which was three rations saved, and he told himself that was discipline.

It was not discipline. It was dread. He had begun to understand that when the letters ran out, he would be alone in a way he had not quite been alone since the beginning of the campaign.

The fifth letter was the brother.

My brother laughed in church. Not quietly. He laughed the way a man laughs when he has decided the sermon has gone on long enough for God to forgive him. My father went scarlet. My mother bit her lip until it bled. He died at Vitoria two years ago, and what I miss is not the comfort of him — it is that laugh. I miss it more than I miss God, and I am not certain what that says about me.

Sebastian stopped there for a long time. Around him the regiment was eating, swearing, repairing cartridge boxes, dealing cards on a drumhead. Men were writing their own letters home, most of them short and bad, filled with lies about how well they were fed.

He thought about the mechanics of the thing he was holding. A girl in a London drawing room, surrounded by lavender and linen, had put on paper the exact shape of the hole her brother had left in her. She had done it better than any poet Sebastian had ever paid a bookseller for. She had done it for a stranger in a ditch with a chipped razor, and she had sealed it with cheap wax and thrown it into the dark like a bottle off a pier.

What were the odds, he thought, that the bottle washed up here.

What were the odds that the only man alive who would ever know her brother’s laugh was a colonel who had never met him, sitting in a wet field, about to be shot at.

He began, without meaning to, to read them as the war allowed: among the noise, among the maps, among the generals arguing over ground they had never walked on. He read one before dawn on the day they moved to the crossroads. He read one in a ditch with the water rising. He memorized whole sentences without trying — the world is entirely mad, I am not certain what that says about me — and he found them surfacing at odd moments, like a song he could not stop whistling.

He was, he knew, doing something filthy. A gentleman did not read another man’s mail. A duke did not need to. He had broken his own honor in the space of a night and then broken it again every three days, and he had discovered, to his own cold surprise, that he did not intend to stop.

Because it was working.

Soldiers had talismans. Carew carried his mother’s thimble. Hooper had carried words he could not read like a boy carrying a lantern he had been told not to light. Sebastian, who had come to war to find something real and found instead that life was a muddy corridor with people dying in it, had found himself an anchor that had nothing to do with flags or glory or the coin of his own title. He kept one sentence in his pocket each day, and the sentence held.

The last letter he saved. Of course he saved it. He carried it for two full weeks without breaking the seal, feeling it through the canvas the way a man feels a coin, and he told himself he was saving it for the right moment.

The right moment arrived on the night of the seventeenth of June, 1815.

The rain came down so hard that the sentries stood with their heads bowed like men in prayer. Twelve thousand men camped in the mud around a crossroads, and the word went through the lines the way a shudder goes through a horse: tomorrow, then. Tomorrow it happens.

Carew sat beside him under a length of canvas, shaking so hard his teeth clicked, and Sebastian, who was cold past shivering, put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and left it there a long time.

Then, when Carew’s breathing had evened out into sleep, he took out the twelfth letter and broke the last seal with his thumbnail.

The letter was short. She wrote about a brass button, about the taste of the word glory, and about how she had stood in the rain to post a letter because she wanted the cold on her face.

And then, at the bottom, in the same sharp hand, the crosses of her t’s like small sword strokes:

Live. Not for the Crown. Not for the banners. Live to spite the men who sent you there.

Sebastian read it twice. He folded the page along its old creases, unbuttoned his coat with fingers that had gone clumsy, and tucked the letter into the breast pocket of his shirt, flat against the left side of his chest.

He was aware, in a distant and unsentimental way, of what he was doing.

It was not a romantic gesture. Men who were about to be shot at did not perform romantic gestures. It was a plate of paper under his ribs, useless against a ball, and it was the only thing he had left that had never once lied to him.

He buttoned the coat over it and lay back against the crate, listening to the rain, and did not sleep at all.